Why I Frames ,Frames ,Flash, Popups are Bad For Seo

10 Design Flaws Which Can Destroy a Site’s SEO

« PREVIOUS POSTNEXT POST »

When it comes to creating a new website, a key dilemma is whether the focus should be on fantastic Design and User Experience (UX), or on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There are many cases where mind-blowing animated design negatively affects the site’s SEO. Whilst you may expect an increasing number of visitors on a better designed website, in reality you may see the opposite occur. In order to be successful, any website needs to perform well in search engines.

Therefore, searching for the compromise is essential.

Most web designers likely to ignore SEO as it limits their artistic possibilities. However, there is no need to cut down on design features for the sake of optimization. Designers can work in tune with SEO specialists and developers to find a formula that would meet both users’ wishes, and search engines’ requirements.

Additionally, there is another trap that must be avoided. Pre-existing sites with good SEO may have to reconsider their efforts during a redesign. Even the smallest of changes can create design errors that will hurt its SEO.

What are these errors? Here are the most common mistakes web designers make when not taking SEO into account:

Mistake #1 – Images Instead of Important Elements

Using images as a primary form of navigation will result in search engines treating them without their functional meaning. On the other hand, pure textual navigation is not a good option either.

The compromise is to use text-over-image techniques with CSS.

On top of this, when using headers, it is also not recommended to replace text with images. Content replaced by beautiful graphics with text may look outstanding, but it will not work for SEO. Header text is intended to highlight important keywords; Replacing them with images will devaluate the content.

Speaking generally about images as website content, it’s essential to know the basics of optimizing them for search engines without sacrificing the design. You can find some useful tips on image optimization here.

Mistake #2 – Lack of Breadcrumbs

A perfectly engineered breadcrumb trail will significantly increase a site’s SEO performance. Text links are easily read by search engines and provide a transparent hierarchical navigation structure. Unfortunately, designers often forget about breadcrumbs, despite the fact that they would noticeably increase the user friendliness of the site.

A good example of breadcrumbs on gameinformer.com

Mistake #3 – A Mobile Version of the Site

As mobile devices have gained more and more popularity in recent years, it’s important to take care of the mobile version of your site. This raises concern regarding whether it’s best to create a separate mobile site, or to use responsive design. According to Matt Cutts of Google, responsive design is a smarter choice for SEO needs. When the mobile version of the site does not perform well (ie. without “rel=canonical”), you can end up with PageRank divided between two pages. This is impossible when using responsive design thanks to using just one URL.

Mistake #4 – Frames

It’s hard to believe there are still websites made with frames. Not only did they become obsolete years ago, but they also won’t act in your favor in website SEO-wise. Frame make it difficult for search engines to read your site with valuable content hidden. As framed websites use three html files instead of one, this causes conflicts with indexation.

The world’s worst website definitely uses frames

Mistake #5 – Improper 404 Page

Creating custom 404 pages is always a possibility to add extraordinary humorous ideas for web designers. But in search of some light relief, they often forget to include the necessary elements.

For example, navigation elements – a link to return to the website. Not only will it improve the user experience, but will also improve the SEO. Otherwise, search engines will find your site contains broken internal links that will reduce its search ranking.

Mistake #6 – Too Much Flash

Visually attractive Flash is still badly indexed by search engines. Surely, your website can contain Flash, but it is recommended not to use it for important content and navigation – and definitely don’t make the entire site Flash. However, it is always up to you to prioritize visual or SEO issues.

Beautiful grimoire.jp Flash design

But the good news is that unlike Flash, HTML5 is SEO-friendly and Google successfully indexes HTML 5 content. Several advantages of HTML5 for SEO are reviewed here.

Mistake #7 – Improper Video Embedding

Whilst video content is a great way to engage your audience, it doesn’t always help your SEO. Specifically, custom Java media players are not readable by search engines. The optimal way is embedding videos directly from YouTube which is owned by Google.

Mistake #8 – Pop-Ups

To begin with, pop-ups are a big no no for designers to use. They are equally badly treated by visitors and search engines. They are annoying and usually closed by most users the moment they appear. Moreover, they immediately evoke prejudice about the website. Search engines don’t even index pop-ups as a part of the site. You can always find another place to put pop-up content on your site; just forget about pop-ups altogether for your own sake.

Mistake #9 – Geo-Redirection

Multi-language sites often use automatic geo-redirection which reads a users’ location and the language of their computer to redirect towards the website with the appropriate locale. Although this is convenient, redirecting away from your home page will hurt SEO. The best way to cope with this problem is to let users manually pick their location.

Mistake #10 – Neglecting Heading Tags

Heading tags are used not only for visual emphasis of content, but have a considerable impact on SEO as well. Saying that search engines like H1 tags means that Google gives them a higher importance. The proper use of H tags includes putting keywords into H1 tag and not using it for a company name or styling purposes.

Generally, all of the mistakes mentioned above are the result of one major mistake which is to consider SEO after designing a website. SEO must be treated as one of the components of a design. A designer can create perfect artwork, but it’ll be absolutely worthless if nobody can find it.

Image:

Text present within images does no good for SEO. If you want your website’s images to be search engine optimized, you need to include a description of the image in the alt text attribute of the image’s HTML, as shown below:

<img src="gaint-prawn.jpg"alt="the gaint pravn at balina">

An Example of the Use of Alt Tags for Images

The following are some important points to note for SEO-friendly images:

• You must include text that is related to the content around it. For example, if you have an image of a formally dressed and well-groomed woman and your site talks about ‘young entrepreneurs,’ describe the image as young entrepreneurs of today and not as smart looking young woman.
• If the image is used for bullet lists or any other decorative purposes you can leave the alt attribute empty i.e. alt=“ “
• If you have images of decorative text, add the same text in the alt attribute.
• Keep the alt text content short and descriptive
• For logos, describe the image as ‘Company Name.’
• Use relevant keywords in context with the content on the page where it is displayed.
• Choose an appropriate file name for the images. Avoid hyphens or underscores.
• Label the file extension, for instance, “.jpg” (JPEG) so that search engines know it is a photo or “.gif” (GIF) so that search engines know it is a graphic.
• If you have a really long description to add to your site’s visuals, learn more about the longdescattribute here.